Phenomenology of religion

Phenomenology of religion, methodological approach to the study of religion that emphasizes the standpoint of the believer. Drawing insights from the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, especially as exemplified by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), it seeks to uncover religion’s essence through investigations that are free from the distorting influences of scholarly or traditional values and prejudices.

Methodology

Phenomenology of religion is distinct from historical, sociological, anthropological, philosophical, and theological approaches to the study of religion. Unlike them, it treats religion as a phenomenon that cannot be explained in terms of any particular aspect of human society, culture, or thought—e.g., as the product of history, as a creation of intellectual elites, or as a set of truth claims about reality or the ends of human life—though it interacts with all of these aspects. To this end, phenomenology of religion draws insights from Husserl’s notion of epochē, the “bracketing” or suspension of judgment. As Gerardus van der Leeuw wrote in his classic text Phänomenologie der Religion (1933; Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in Phenomenology), phenomenologists of religion seek to suspend their beliefs about religions in order to describe them in their own terms from a standpoint that is “empathetic” with their respective adherents. Phenomenology of religion is also comparative, seeking out aspects of religious life that are, its proponents suggest, universal or essential rather than applicable only to particular traditions.

Most approaches since the discipline’s founding have located the essence of religion in the human experience of a purportedly universal and transcendent—though indeterminate—aspect of reality. Recalling the French sociologist Émile Durkheim’s classification of religious phenomena into the “sacred” and the “profane,” most phenomenologists of religion call this aspect the sacred, and those who do not will at least refer to it in terms that evoke the sense of an encounter with a sublime, suprahuman other.

In his book Das Heilige (1917; The Idea of the Holy), the German theologian Rudolf Otto wrote that all religions arise from the experience of the numinous, which he characterized as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the transcendent mystery that humans find both terrifying and compelling. This mystery, which Otto called the holy rather than the sacred, is so profound—Otto wrote of a “clear overplus of meaning”—that it compels not only respect but also reverence, which is the wellspring of religious thought, behaviour, and culture.

Rudolf Otto, 1925.

Foto-Jannasch, Marburg/Art Resource, New York

Mircea Eliade, a Romanian-born scholar who fostered the study of the history of religions at the University of Chicago, constructed another influential notion of the sacred. In The Sacred and the Profane (1959), he identified it with the transcendent reality that “breaks through” in some tangibleform within mundane existence. Such a manifestation of the sacred—a phenomenon that Eliade called a “hierophany”—subsequently becomes an object of devotion in a religious tradition. In The Sacred and the Profane and subsequent works, he demonstrated how hierophanies have influenced the ways in which religious traditions distinguish between sacred and profane spaces and interpret and measure the flow of time.

Mircea Eliade.

Courtesy of the University of Chicago

Both Otto and Eliade viewed the sacred as something not only existential and experiential but also static and transhistorical, unaffected by historical change. The 20th-century British scholar of religion Ninian Smart developed a phenomenological model that featured a more dynamic vision of the sacred that could explain the diversity among religions, much of which it attributed to historical and cultural differences. Smart proposed that the sacred manifests itself in human life in seven dimensions: (1) the doctrinal or philosophical, (2) the mythical, (3) the ethical, (4) the experiential, (5) the ritual, (6) the social, and (7) the material. In Smart’s conception, each religious tradition, to a greater or lesser degree, has a system of core beliefs, a narrative that explains and justifies them, a moral code that it expects its followers to live by, an emotional investment that it wants them to make, a set of practices that help them to do so, and both an institutional structure and a material culture that create the arena within which they live their faith. However it may be conceived by adherents of a particular religion, the sacred is present in, mediated by, and expressed through these seven dimensions, according to Smart.

The most prevalent and substantial criticism of phenomenology of religion concerns its attempt to seek out and present universal or essential aspects of religious life. Critics charge that in following Otto’s and Eliade’s lead and positing the sacred as religion’s essence, phenomenologists unduly favour a Western, and especially Christian, concept of religion. The holy or the sacred may fit certain aspects of Christianity, Judaism, or even Islam but may be inappropriate to the study of some forms of Buddhism or of some aspects of Chinese folk religions. Smart’s dimensions, however, constitute a response to this objection; they provide a seemingly multicultural and cross-traditional approach that nevertheless conceives of religion as having a discernible essence.

The history of religions and the phenomenology of religion are generally understood by scholars to be nonnormative—that is, they attempt to delineate facts, whether historical or structural, without judging them from a Christian or other standpoint. At any rate, their tasks are considered to be different from that of articulating and systematizing a faith. The same, in principle, is true...

...been made to classify entire religions or religious communities, in recent times the interest in classifying entire religions has markedly declined, partly because of an emerging interest in the phenomenology of religion.